DFG-funded Collaborative Research Center (CRC)
1102/Sonderforschungsbereich (SFB) 1102
“Information Density and Linguistic Encoding”
at Saarland University, Germany, welcomes
applications for a wide range of PhD and
post-doctoral postions (please check the Job
announcement for the details on how to apply
for the post-doctoral positions:
http://linguistlist.org/jobs/get-jobs.cfm?id=33987498).

The CRC includes 14 research projects drawing
upon psycholinguistics, computational
linguistics, diachronic sociolinguistics,
phonetics, discourse and contrastive
linguistics. We are seeking to recruit 16 PhD
students. The interviews will be held on July
14-25, 2014. The starting date of the PhD
positions is Oct 1, 2014.

The CRC’s research projects jointly address the
hypothesis that language variation and language
use can be better understood in terms of the
goal of speakers to modulate the amount of
information conveyed in an utterance. More
specifically, a wide range of linguistic,
psycholinguistic and computational methods will
be brought to bear in explaining the multitude
of choices speakers make regarding when they
encode their messages – from the choice of
words, structuring of syntactic elements, and
arranging sentences in discourse. Processing
linguistic material has been shown to be
correlated with its contextually determined
predictability and may be appropriately indexed
by Shannon’s notion of information. The CRC
investigates the hypothesis that (i) processing
complexity is indexed by Surprisal across
linguistic levels, and (ii) that variation in
language use may be characterized by the
optimal distribution of information across the
linguistic signal.

Requirements:
- All applicants should posses MA/MSc. Note
that we are happy to receive applications by
people who have not yet finished their MA/MSc
by the time of application but will have
submitted their thesis by the starting date or
shortly thereafter.

How to apply:
Applicants are requested to submit their
application, together with:
- an academic curriculum vitae (CV);
- a list of academic publications;
- copies of academic degree certificates;
- two potential references.
For details on the individual projects and
positions see: www.sfb1102.uni-saarland.de
Applications must be sent directly to the lead
PI of the particular project that students wish
to apply to. Applicants may apply to more than
one project/position - in such case, they
should indicate this in each of their
applications by stating the relevant project
and position number(s) and specifying an order
of preference.

Saarland University is an equal opportunity
employer. Applications of women are strongly
encouraged; applications of persons with
disabilities will be given preferential
treatment to those of other candidates with
equal qualifications.

Saarland University offers a lively academic
environment that is famous for its
interdisciplinary research in language and
computation. In CRC 1102, we entertain active
collaborative links with the Department of
Computer Science, the Max Planck Institute for
Informatics, the Max Planck Institute for
Software Systems, the German Institute for
Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) as well as the
Cluster of Excellence Multimodal Computing and
Interaction (M2CI: http://www.mmci.uni-saarland.de/).